Head’s role

I have a bittersweet feeling today. Danielle is moving on from Clearleft.

I used to get really down when people left. Over time I’ve learned not to take it as such a bad thing. I mean, of course it’s sad when someone moves on, but for them, it’s exciting. And I should be sharing in that excitement, not putting a damper on it.

Besides, people tend to stay at Clearleft for years and years — in the tech world, that’s unheard of. So it’s not really so terrible when they decide to head out to pastures new. They’ll always be Clearlefties. Just look at the lovely parting words from Harry, Paul, Ellen, and Ben:

Working at Clearleft was one of the best decisions I ever made. 6 years of some work that I’m most proud of, amongst some of the finest thinkers I’ve ever met.

(Side note: I’ve been thinking about starting a podcast where I chat to ex-Clearlefties. We could reflect on the past, look to the future, and generally just have a catch-up. Would that be self indulgent or interesting? Let me know what you think.)

So of course I’m going to miss working with Danielle, but as with other former ‘lefties, I’m genuinely excited to see what happens next for her. Clearleft has had an excellent three years of her time and now it’s another company’s turn.

In the spirit of “one door closes, another opens,” Danielle’s departure creates an opportunity for someone else. Fancy working at Clearleft? Well, we’re looking for a head of front-end development.

Do you remember back at the start of the year when we were hiring a front-end developer, and I wrote about writing job postings?

My first instinct was to look at other job ads and take my cue from them. But, let’s face it, most job ads are badly written, and prone to turning into laundry lists. So I decided to just write like I normally would. You know, like a human.

That worked out really well. We ended up hiring the ridiculously talented Trys Mudford. Success!

So I’ve taken the same approach with this job ad. I’ve tried to paint as clear and honest a picture as I can of what this role would entail. Like it says, there are three main parts to the job:

• business support,
• technical leadership, and
• professional development.

Now, I could easily imagine someone reading the job description and thinking, “Nope! Not for me.” Let’s face it: There Will Be Meetings. And a whole lotta context switching:

Within the course of one day, you might go from thinking about thorny code problems to helping someone on your team with their career plans to figuring out how to land new business in a previously uncharted area of technology.

I can equally imagine someone reading that and thinking “Yes! This is what I’ve been waiting for.”

Oh, and in case you’re wondering why I’m not taking this role …well, in the short term, I will for a while, but I’d consider myself qualified for maybe one third to one half of the required tasks. Yes, I can handle the professional development side of things (in fact, I really, really enjoy that). I can handle some of the technical leadership stuff — if we’re talking about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, accessibility, and performance. But all of the back-of-the-front-end stuff — build tools, libraries, toolchains — is beyond me. And I think I’d be rubbish at the business support stuff, mostly because that doesn’t excite me much. But maybe it excites you! If so, you should apply.

I can picture a few scenarios where this role could be the ideal career move…

Suppose you’re a lead developer at a product company. You enjoy leading a team of devs, and you like setting the technical direction when it comes to the tools and techniques being used. But maybe you’re frustrated by always working on the same product with the same tech stack. The agency world, where every project is different, might be exactly what you’re looking for.

Or maybe you’re an accomplished and experienced front-end developer, freelancing and contracting for years. Perhaps you’re less enamoured with being so hands-on with the code all the time. Maybe you’ve realised that what you really enjoy is solving problems and evaluating techologies, and you’d be absolutely fine with having someone else take care of the implementation. Moving into a lead role like this might be the perfect way to make the best use of your time and have more impact with your decisions.

You get the idea. If any of this is sounding intriguing to you, you should definitely apply for the role. What do you have to lose?

Also, as it says in the job ad:

If you’re from a group that is under-represented in tech, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

This was originally posted on my own site.